Blog - Page 92
A collection of 2,456 blog posts
Recently, I read a great book and promised to mail it to a friend overseas when I was done… about nine months ago. Today, I finally wandered down to the post office and mailed it, because the alternative was working on this blog post. This is classic procrastination at work. If you’ve noticed yourself doing this as well, you might have explored “cures” for procrastination , or tips to improve your productivity [ht
We all have goals and dreams, but it can be difficult to stick with them. Each week, I hear from people who say things like, “I start with good intentions, but I can’t seem to maintain my consistency for a long period of time.” Or, they will say, “I struggle with mental endurance. I get started but I can’t seem to follow through and stay focused for very long.” Don’t worry. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. For example, I’ll start one project, work on it for a little bit, then lose
Five years ago I was re-doing my last year of high school, managing a retail store full-time and performing in a play five nights a week. Suffice to say I burned out pretty quickly and in hindsight I can see why. Hindsight is a grand thing, but we don’t all go through the same experiences, so the hindsight of others can be beneficial to us as well. These 13 successful entrepreneurs and startupers have some great stories to tell, and I thought asking what they wish they knew five years ago would
While just a little over turning 3 years old, Instagram has made huge strides in social media. With over 150 million users on the platform, 16 billion photos shared, and 1 billion likes happening each day, the photo-sharing and editing platform is one of the most engaging channels on social media. Instagram has some pretty different functionalities in comparison to other social media sites and is fundamentally based on being able to simply upload and share beautiful images instantly. Except, lo
When I wrote a recent post for Buffer titled 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier , I didn’t even consider the possibility that striving for happiness might not be in our best interests. Who wouldn’t want to be happier? Happiness isn’t necessarily bad for us, but I did find out recently that happiness alone isn’t enough for us to feel fulfilled. Sadly, chasing happiness is really common thes
When Joel started Buffer , its aim was to help you schedule Twitter updates for smarter sharing. It’s come a long way since then, and now we have lots of features to help you improve your social media presence across a whole bunch of networks. To help you get the most out of Buffer, we collected 10 of the most useful features together into this post. 1. Using Feedly and Buffer [https://buffer.com/resources/feedly
I’m super excited to share that Niel de la Rouviere has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp* and recently accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time! Niel is from South Africa and works on Buffer all the way from Taipei (we’re a distributed team ). Niel has lots of experience with various different JavaScript frameworks such as Backbone.js and AngularJS. It has
It doesn’t matter how you choose to live your life — whether you build a business or work a corporate job; have children or choose not to have children; travel the world or live in the same town all of your life; go to the gym 5 times a week or sit on the couch every night — whatever you do, someone will judge you for it. For one reason or another, someone will find a reason to project their insecurities, their negativity, and their fears onto you and your life, and you’ll have to deal with it.
At Buffer we recently spent the past 6 weeks focusing on one key metric – reducing churn rate. Comparing to the initial setting up of the growth effort with lots of experimentation and exploratory data analysis, it was a conscious shift to align the team’s focus on one key metric. Here are 6 ideas for those of you who run subscription-based businesses. Churn rate can be broadly defined as the prop
The cutthroat inbox of your standard consumer roils with marketing messages, competitive subject lines, and scores of attention-seeking emails. With over 144 billion emails sent each and every day, email marketing remains one of the elite channels for business communication. So how does the signal separate itself from the noise? To be sure, finding the key to a stand-out message is critical to your bottom line—whether that bottom line is cold, hard cash or community engagement or anything in be
The internet went nuts a couple of days ago (or at least, the SEO world of it did) when Google confirmed that it would be encrypting almost all keyword searches in the near future. The Not provided Google Analytics section has easily become the most talked about thing in the past. Various industry professionals weighed in on the change, what it means for marketers and what other options we have to inform our marketing choices. Let’s take a look at what happened exactly, and then we’ll explore
Below is the monthly update email I have just sent this morning to all our investors. I hope you enjoy taking a read about the full details of our work on Buffer in the last month. I’m excited to hear from you in the comments if you have any questions about what we’re up to! Traction update: * New users: 66,000 (Total: 1,046,000, from 980,000: +7%) * Daily active users: 30,000 (from 29,000: +3%) * Revenue: $174,000 (Annual: $2,088,000 up from $1,968,000: +6%) * Business revenue: $12,340 (up
The below are all the stats and actual revenue numbers from Buffer for Business. Buffer for Business was soft-launched a few weeks ago and we were lucky about the strong responses so far from users. As we default to transparency and want to try and help as many people as possible with our own learnings and failings, we thought about making these numbers public too! (Granted, this was a bit scary, but here we
The list is the origin of culture. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. – Umberto Eco When I was a kid, I read a book called The Listmaker. It’s about a young girl who uses lists to organize and make sense of her life. At the time I didn’t read any more into it besides the fact that this was an odd hobby for a pre-teen girl to spend s
Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of October. It features our latest thoughts, ideas and questions about content and the Buffer blog . Since we default to transparency with our culture , we thought making this public could be useful for others too. Quick Summary In September we published 15 posts on the Buffer blog, 3 of which were guest posts. Our total uniques we
What governs the way you write? Consistency in style, tone, grammar, and punctuation is essential to an enjoyable blog experience. Successfully done, these elements go unnoticed by readers who are too busy consuming the easy, breezy content. That’s the way it should be. Style guides create uniform content and allow that content to shine. Invisibility is the hallmark of a well-used style guide. You may not even notice the hundreds of subtle decisions that make browsing a blog seamless, but know
Facebook changes so fast, I often miss new features or updates to existing ones. Since there have been a few changes recently, I thought it would be helpful to do a bit of a wrap-up of what Facebook’s been up to. 1. Images are now bigger and wider – Here are the right sizes to use Some recent changes to how Facebook displays thumbnail images mean that we need to be more aware of the size and aspect ration of any pictures we post. Because Facebook will automatically resize images that don’t matc
Get ready to have your mind blown. I was seriously shocked at some of these mistakes in thinking that I subconsciously make all the time. Obviously, none of them are huge, life-threatening mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more rational, sensible decisions. Especially as we strive for continued self-improvement as we build Buffer’s social media management platform, if we look at our values, being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thin
I’m really excited to write this post today! It’s the feature I’m most excited about, and I hope that it’ll be equally helpful for you to start using it! If you’re anything like me, I’ve had this one on my Buffer wishlist for a long time. Since at Buffer we want to focus the most on helping you share better on social media and saving you time by scheduling your updates, we’re really ex
In 1966, a dyslexic sixteen-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first
Twitter hashtags are so ingrained in Twitter now that I rarely second-guess them. They seem so much a part of the service, it’s as if Twitter shipped with them in its original version, even before it had vowels in the name. But actually, Twitter’s version of the hashtag has a vibrant history which is really fascinating. Let’s take a look at the origins of the hashtag and how to use it best on Twitter. The origin of the hashtag The very ephemerality of hashtags is what makes them easy and com
Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjusting my own routine in the hopes of getting more done and wasting less time in-between tasks or activities. While it’s important to understand how your own brain works and what routine will suit your body best, I always find it interesting to see what works for others when planning something new for myself. Amazing routines of 7 successful entrepreneurs In the hopes of building
Wow! We couldn’t believe it. With all of you on board, we’ve hit the milestone we didn’t even dream about when starting Buffer: 1,000,000 people have signed up for Buffer as of today. We thought, what an incredible opportunity to reflect on the journey up until this point. To breakdown some of the core numbers about Buffer, take a look at the infographic below: Along the way to reach 1m users a lot has happened for us. Here is a brief review of the last 2.5 years: The journey to the 1 millio
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest piece on how to build customer loyalty . Why are we, as consumers, so captivated by stories of great customer service? Perhaps it’s because they serve as a much needed reminder that there are still companies out there who care about their customers. Every company says customers are their #1 priority, but st
